Adgully Exclusive | zinio's Rual Suarez: India is a good country to do business!

A publishing technology services company, Zinio is the global leader for digital publishing products and services. Through its wide-ranging offerings from marketing programs, the company provides publishers with new circulation and revenue growth opportunities. Market programs include customer acquisition, maintenance and cross-promotion across platforms and a robust e-commerce engine and extensive digital delivery, circulation and fulfillment services. This includes a wide range of publications from magazines, books, catalogs to newsletters and researches. Through this kind of platform, Zinio allows the reader to attain a digital publication in one manner and be able to read it across multiple devices that include Windows, Macintosh and linux based computers, Apple iPad, Apple iPhone and the Apple iPod Touch.

Rual Suarez, Managing Director of Zinio International talks to Adgully about the opportunities and the growth potential of the Indian market.

According to Suarez, the Indian community outside of India in the US and the UK is already in millions. And if you consider the distribution is complex and expensive, on a short term India is a very interesting market. Considering that the reading devices are penetrating very strongly in the US and UK markets, so it is a very efficient way of accessing the content. "On the domestic side, the opportunities clearly will take a little bit longer because reading devices are not that readily available. Although the PC platform where we have our senior reader available is a fantastic initial in a way of accessing, especially in some parts of India, where it is very difficult because of distribution issues. On the third level, many Indians can now access international content at the local price." He said

He further went on to say how young a market India is in every sense with half its population being young people. Therefore it is also skipping many phases of other countries and it is seen that people are in an immediate touch with new technology. He thinks it is crucial to push for more awareness but is not of the opinion that the market needs any sort of evangelization process.

"In terms of growth, India has an exponential potential for growth. Exponential, because it is already exponential in other countries, and we are just starting here." He added.

Zinio today has digital newsstands of 26 countries which are localized in 25 languages and currencies and it is still growing. It has content over 40 countries like Europe, US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Singapore and so on. Zinio has users, clients and readers in more than 200 countries.

How have the Indians responded to Zinio?

Suarez says, "India is a very dynamic society. They are very open to do business and therefore easy. However it is not easy to close a business. It is a fantastic country because things are always on the move. People are also aware that they need to be pro-active. It is a good country to do business"

Suarez stresses on the importance of content creation and not in technology or distribution. "We as publishers will concentrate on content creation. We are offering four e-commerce platforms to publishers that sell their digitized versions whenever they are ready and development, so that they need not invest in application developmental additionally. It is complex to develop apps in many different operating systems. We take care of that. We deliver customer information back to the publishers and have the possibility of having their content available on all screens", he says on the solutions offered to Indian publishers.

Suarez believes that there is a clear need of Zinio in the India market and since it is mainly revenue sharing basis, it is not difficult to work in this market, especially because they are not selling any technology. Although he does see a number of new players entering the market in the future, he does not see any competition from existing players. "I don't see any company delivering revenue for publishers that easy as we are doing as of now", he added.

For consumers to accept this product faster in this particular market, Suarez believes it is a combination of content availability, price policing and device availability. "I believe this will be very appealing for education purposes besides for leisure and business. We need to be aware that India has a low penetration level on smart phone and computers and so it will take time but the adoption is very quick. Tablets are going to change a lot and how we access content and train people and use it as a leisure device. So we will see a lot of changes coming", he said.